This is not satire.
Late last year, the Albanese Government appointed outgoing Mirvac CEO Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz to lead the federal government’s interim National Housing Supply and Affordability Council.
Lloyd-Hurwitz has also held positions at Macquarie Bank and on the board of the Property Council of Australia.
Housing Minister Julie Collins said the Council will provide the federal government with advice on measures that can boost housing supply and affordability.
“We’re creating a National Housing Supply and Affordability Council, to deliver independent advice to government on ways to increase housing supply and affordability”, Collins said.
“Ms Lloyd-Hurwitz’s experience in the sector will be invaluable as we continue working to ensure more Australians have a safe and affordable place to call home”.
Talk about putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
Putting a developer and former Property Council spiv in charge of housing “supply” and “affordability” is like putting an outgoing gas cartel leader in charge of energy policy.
It will lead to housing policies that are in the property lobby’s interests, rather than the interests of Australians.
To nobody’s surprise, Lloyd-Hurwitz has rubbished the idea of moderating immigration to allow housing supply to keep pace with demand.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz told The AFR that a temporary reduction in Australia’s surging net migration levels is a “short-term sugar hit” that would be the wrong solution and would do much more harm than good.
“The far greater good is to get on and fix the real problem which has been decades in the making – fundamentally a housing supply issue”, she said.
“The far greater good is having the labour we need in this country that we’ve been missing over the past two years”.
Spoken like a property developer.
The absurdity of Australia’s housing crisis is encapsulated by the Federal Budget’s population forecasts, which are outlined in the table below:
Australia’s population is officially projected to increase by 2.18 million people in the five years to 2026-27, or by an average of 435,200 people each year.
This population increase will be driven by unprecedented net overseas migration of 1.5 million people over the same period.
To put that 2.18 million figure into perspective, it is equivalent to adding five Canberra’s or one Perth’s worth of people to Australia’s current population in only five years, but obviously without the housing and infrastructure to match.
Catering for such a huge increase in population is an insurmountable task under the best housing conditions.
It is even worse when the entire home building industry is on its knees suffering from widespread insolvencies amid soaring materials prices and financing (interest rate) costs.
The extent of the housing crisis facing Australia is illustrated in the next chart showing dwelling completions against actual and projected population growth, as set out in the Federal Budget:
As you can see, Australia did not build enough homes in the fifteen years of ‘Big Australia” immigration leading up to the pandemic.
Now the housing supply situation is certain to deteriorate further given actual construction levels are falling at the same time as Australia is projected to experience record population growth of between 400,000 and 500,000 people a year.
The fact remains that Australia has built far more homes per capita than the OECD average:
The problem is that Australia has also run one of the world’s largest immigration programs, which has ensured that housing demand has forever run ahead of supply – a situation that will only worsen under the Budget’s extreme immigration settings.
If the Albanese Government genuinely cared about ending the nation’s housing shortage, it would run an immigration program significantly lower than the growth of the overall dwelling stock, not the other way around.
Yet, Lloyd-Hurwitz has chosen to gaslight the public and scapegoat a ‘lack of supply’ rather than being honest and addressing the immigration elephant in the room.
Australia will never build enough homes so long as its population grows like a science experiment though extreme immigration.
Australia’s housing problem is really an excessive immigration problem.
